Deaf School Board to Name Its New $43.5 Million Residence Hall

The governing board of the Texas School for the Deaf will meet Nov. 13 in Austin and vote on a name for the residence hall now going up on its South Congress Avenue campus for deaf students in their late teens and early twenties.

The building belongs to the school’s ACCESS program, which teaches independent living and job skills to deaf Texans roughly 18 to 22 who have finished high school. The $43.5 million project puts up a three-story apartment block of about 40,000 square feet — sixteen four-bedroom units housing as many as 64 students — and adds about 13,000 square feet of classrooms, a wood shop and teaching kitchens to the adjacent Kleberg building, which dates from 1983. It is designed on DeafSpace principles, an architectural approach built around sightlines and visual communication. The Legislature paid for it. Construction began this year and will take about two years, with students moving in for the 2028-29 school year.

The board will also vote on a list of library books, an item that first appeared on its agenda in November 2025 and has returned since. Texas school district boards were required that year, under a new state law, to approve library purchases and donations themselves and to post proposed lists publicly for 30 days first. Whether that law reaches the Texas School for the Deaf is not clear: it is written for school districts and charter schools, and the school is a state agency whose board is told by a separate statute to conduct itself like a district board. The Dispatch could not establish that the law binds the school, and neither the state education agency’s guidance nor the school’s own policies resolve it. A school policy adopted in 2022 already placed responsibility for library purchases with the board.

The rest of the agenda is the school’s fall housekeeping: electing board officers, approving the operating budget for the year that began in September, adopting the annual plan for improving student performance, and signing off on last year’s annual report.

Three of the nine seats expire Jan. 31, 2027, days after Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa takes office.

Meeting at a glance

Board members

• Shawn P. Saladin — president; Edinburg; assistant dean, UT Rio Grande Valley.
• Heather “Hex” Lightfoot — vice president; Austin; consultant, Texas Deafblind Project.
• Christopher Moreland — secretary; New Braunfels; internal medicine physician and professor.
• Lisalee Denyse Egbert — Arlington; professor of ASL and deaf studies, UT Arlington.
• Gregorio Mata — Edinburg; operations associate, Activating Change; school alumnus.
• Darlene “DJ” Nobles — Waco; owner, Interpreters 2 Go.
• Oscar Ocuto — associate professor of education, Gallaudet University.
• Lauren Ridloff — Austin; actress; mother of two deaf sons.
• Kathy Sellers — Kosse; lead interpreter, Bryan ISD and a regional day school.

All nine seats are filled. Names, cities and terms are from the school’s board page, checked November 6, and match the governor’s appointment releases. Ocuto’s city is given as Austin by the school and Manchaca by the governor’s office, so none is printed; Moreland’s university affiliation likewise differs between the two sources. State law requires that at least five members be deaf, at least one be a school alumnus, at least three be parents of a deaf person and at least three have experience working with deaf people; the Dispatch could not verify from public sources which members satisfy which requirement. The terms of Nobles, Ridloff and Sellers expire January 31, 2027.